William (Castle Keep) Eastlake has visited Southeast Asia twice since
1966, but no one could be less of a war-correspondent novelist. In The
Bamboo Bed, he approaches the struggle in Viet Nam not as a
three-dimensional event but as the frighteningly abstract piece of
surrealism that we all share on the evening news. Black comedy, myth,
shaggy parables of the top secrets of the human heartthese are the
literary forms war takes for Eastlake.